First of all, lots of the faculty are fairly miserable, and they like to make other people feel worse, and since at a place like Hahvahd they are almost all at least pretty smart, when they put their minds to that, they will likely succeed.
FLG hasn't really seen a noticeable difference in the intelligence of his professors at any of the schools he's attended, and these run the gamut from community college to flagship state school to Georgetown. He thinks this is a function of the glut of PhDs in many areas. The supply is so great that there are more than enough smart people with the requisite education to fill the spots. Probably many times over.
Another thing is that the people who get into grad schools have all already done well in school, and presumably are all pretty smart. Say Harvard PhD programs take people with 3.7 and higher and the programs at the University of Massachusetts take people with 3.5 and higher. Much of that discrepancy is probably do to a marginal difference in the focus on academics vis-a-vis other commitments by the student, not primarily an intelligence difference. Moreover, FLG'd argue the law of diminishing returns is kicking in. At some point being smarter and smarter doesn't really matter all that much in the big scheme of things. Basically, my point is that the faculty at Princeton probably isn't noticeably smarter, on average, than the faculty at, say, Rutgers.
The undergraduate student body is a whole different issue, and I'm sure Princeton professors can teach their classes at a much more accelerated rate and advanced level than Rutgers professors. But, again, FLG is not so sure that it really matters too much. The difference in the amount of knowledge he gained from community college classes versus Georgetown classes was, while not insignificant, may not be worth the effort in the long-run simply because FLG will, in all likelihood, forget those details.
Perhaps somebody would disagree and say something like Princeton economics consists of MIT, Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Stanford, and Princeton PhDs. Those are the BEST schools. At Rutgers, riff-raff snuck in from lowly places, like UPenn, Cornell, and Duke.
Posts
5 comments:
If you look at how much "free counseling"($2000 per anum I last knew) as well as access to heavy meds are automatically handed over to Princeton students these days - Princeton kids did not require them in Mr. P's day- I seriously wonder about the ability of the professors being able to instruct at an accelerated level.
You are on to something. I know Mr. P's good friend at State would say Michigan had better Economics profs and the only reason most folks are not conservative - conservative does not equate to being Republican- is that too few students take economics classes. And then those that do at Princeton get Krugman...
By the by, are you aware of the very real drought of liberal arts students at the better schools? They are becoming as rare a Classics students. The better schools have morphed into high-end trade schools right before our eyes.
Sad.
Mrs. P
Maybe true, but in general, the value of simply being smart begins to diminish after about 9th grade. Faculty get hired not just for having PhDs, but presumably doing something with them--that is, their scholarship. In an ideal world, maybe the quality of their teaching would matter as well. But the result (again, this is somewhat idealized) is that top schools hire more professors who've done important, original scholarship. This doesn't necessarily mean they are smarter in that a Georgetown history professor would know more facts about the Civil War than a GMU professor.
Now whether that scholarship difference positively affects student learning is less clear, though I'm fairly sure that studying with more advanced fellow students does. There is a huge difference between what my mother's students at Crappy Franchise Technical School learned about writing essays in college, and what you or I did by starting out among classmates who had already encountered and understood the concepts of theses, evidence, even rhetoric. This is not to say, of course, that all our classmates were brilliant writers, but that they grasped in principle rules of argument that most people their age do not, allowing us to begin thinking about our own writing somewhere above the "how can i fit this into a five-paragraph essay model?" stage.
Mrs. P:
"the only reason most folks are not conservative - conservative does not equate to being Republican- is that too few students take economics classes."
"The better schools have morphed into high-end trade schools right before our eyes."
Wouldn't the high-end trade school mean they are learning economics? In fact, since economics is the largest or close to the largest major at most schools, then shouldn't better schools be churning out conservatives by the bucket load?
In all honesty, I think taking economics is not enough. Every intro econ class has that one person who just doesn't "get it" because their politics are getting in the way. Though, taking an econ class is certainly a huge step in the right direction for everybody.
MSI:
I think your point on more original scholarship is well-taken. However, I also wonder whether that matters for education. Also, I don't think original always equates with better.
The writing point is also well-taken. But the facility with writing that Chicago or Georgetown students possess upon arrival ought to be the standard for high school graduates.
"Wouldn't the high-end trade school mean they are learning economics?"
You would think so, wouldn't you?
I did say Krugman is at Princeton ;-)
Now an acquaintance went to Yale Biz a few years back and the majority of his class -like he did- went into non-profits upon graduation.
I never understood why non-profits needed Ivy biz school grads....nor why Ivy biz school grads after coughing up so much $$$$$$$$ would go into Non-profits but then I saw the recent ACORN videos and suddenly the scales dropped from my eyes...
I think you are correct - one needs more than an intro to economics.
Oh, and our Yale biz school acquaintance got married and had a baby. Now he's in for-profit at American Express. The non-profits couldn't pay for all his school loans and his family's needs....
Mrs. P
MSI sends a shout-out to GMU. We GMU students send our thanks and best wishes. Hope you are having fun up there.
Post a Comment